Nate Anderson of Ars Technica has posted an interview with Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) about Defining Internet “Freedom”. Neither Sen. Franken nor Mr. Anderson ever get around to defining that term in their exchange, but the clear implication from the piece is that “freedom” means freedom for the government to plan more and for policymakers to more closely monitor and control the Internet economy.  The clearest indication of this comes when Sen. Franken repeats the old saw that net neutrality regulation is “the First Amendment issue of our time.”

As a lover of liberty, I find this corruption of language and continued debasement of the term “freedom” to be extremely troubling. The thinking we see at work here reflects the ongoing effort by many cyber-progressives (or “cyber-collectivists,” as I prefer to call them) to redefine Internet freedom as liberation from the supposed tyranny of the marketplace and the corresponding empowerment of techno-cratic philosopher kings to guide us toward a more enlightened and noble state of affairs. We are asked to ignore our history lessons, which teach us that centralized planning and bureaucracy all too often lead to massively inefficient outcomes, myriad unforeseen unintended consequences, bureaucratic waste, and regulatory capture.  Instead, we are asked to believe that high-tech entrepreneurs are the true threat to human progress and liberty. They are cast as nefarious villains and their innovations, we are told, represent threats to our “freedom.” We even hear silly comparisons likening innovators like Apple to something out of George Orwell’s 1984. 

To be clear, I am not saying everything will be sunshine and roses in a free information marketplace. Mistakes will be made by those innovators and there will even be short-term spells of what many would regard as excessive corporate market power. The question is how much faith we should place in central planners, as opposed to evolutionary market forces, to solve that problem.  Those who truly love liberty and real human freedom would have more patience with competition and technological change and be willing to see how things play out. In other words, “market failures” and “code failures” are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up responses than by coercive, top-down approaches.

The decisive advantage of the market-driven approach is nimbleness. It is during what some might regard as a market’s darkest hour when some of the most exciting disruptive technologies and innovations develop. People don’t sit still; they respond to incentives, including short spells of apparently excessive private power. But they can only do so if they are truly free from artificial constraint from government forces who, inevitably, are always one or two steps behind fast-moving technological developments. Thus, we shouldn’t allow the cyber-collectivists to sell us their version of “freedom” in which markets are instead constantly reshaped through incessant regulatory interventions. That isn’t freedom, it’s tyranny.

More insulting to me is the continued repetition of this balderdash about how Net neutrality is “the First Amendment issue of our time.”  As I’ve pointed out before here before in my essay on “Net Neutrality Regulation & the First Amendment,” the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts Federal Communications Commission bureaucrats in control of the Digital Economy. America’s Founding Fathers intended the First Amendment to serve as a shield from government encroachment on our liberties, not as a sword for government to wield to reshape markets and speech according to the whims of five unelected bureaucrats at the FCC. Anyone who suggests otherwise is engaging in revisionist history of the highest order.

Sadly, however, countless people seem to buy into this twisted vision of “Internet freedom” today. They stand ready to empower the techno-planners, to call in the code cops, and to roll out the tech pork barrel in their invitation to Washington to give the Digital Economy a great big bear hug.

You can call this vision many things, but pro-freedom is not one of them.  As Berin Szoka and I have argued here in the past, true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest” — an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

If you stand for liberty, the choice of which conception of “Net freedom” to embrace is simple.

I’ve posted another response in the Cato Unbound online debate over the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace upon the book’s 10th anniversary.  You will recall that I went fairly hard on Prof. Lessig in my essay, “Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of ‘Perfect Control,’” and Lessig responded with a counter-punch that went after me for it.  I respond in a new essay about “Our Conflict of Cyber-Visions.” In the piece, I address Lessig’s assertion that I just didn’t understand the central teachings of Code, as well as his reluctance to accept the “cyber-collectivism” label that I affixed to his book and life’s work.  Again, please hop over to Cato Unbound for my complete response.

But one thing from the essay that I thought worth reproducing here is my effort to better define the key principles that separate the cyber-libertarian and cyber-collectivist schools of thinking.  I argue that it comes down to this:

The cyber-libertarian believes that “code failures” are ultimately better addressed by voluntary, spontaneous, bottom-up, marketplace responses than by coerced, top-down, governmental solutions. Moreover, the decisive advantage of the market-driven approach to correcting code failure comes down to the rapidity and nimbleness of those response(s).

Of course, another key difference relates to how quickly one jumps to the conclusion that “code failures” are actually occurring at all. I argue:

What concerns me about the way Prof. Lessig approaches these issues in Code and in his subsequent work is that he is far too quick to declare the debate over by labeling short-term code hiccups as sky-is-falling market failures. The end result of such myopic techno-pessimism is the inevitable call for governments to intervene and “do something” to correct supposed code failures.  The cyber-libertarian instead counsels patience. Let’s give those other forces — alternative platforms, new innovators, social norms, public pressure, etc. — a chance to work some magic. Evolution happens, if you let it. Moreover, if you are always running around crying “market failure!” and calling in the code cops, it creates perverse marketplace incentives by discouraging efforts to innovate or “route around” bad code or code failure. We don’t want the whole world sitting around waiting for government to regulate the mousetrap to improve it or even give everyone better access to it; we should want the world to be innovating to create better mousetraps! To reiterate a key point I already stressed in my original essay: One need not believe that the markets in code are “perfectly competitive” to accept that they are “competitive enough” — or at least, better than regulatory alternatives.

Anyway, please head over to the Cato site to read the whole thing and let me know what you think.  If nothing else, I’m sure that Seth Finkelstein will have something incredibly nasty to say about me!  And I will wear his scorn as a badge of honor.